Pinsents to cut 40 support jobs to eradicate post-merger duplication

Around 40 members of support staff at Pinsent Masons are set to lose their jobs following the firm’s merger with Scottish firm McGrigors.

Pinsent Masons has begun a redundancy consultation, which is expected to finish at the end of next month, that will see around 40 support jobs cut.

The firm said that it has been forced to make cuts because its 1 May merger with McGrigors (6 February 2012) created duplicated roles in its support teams.

The cuts will affect only the firm’s UK offices and no fee-earners are at risk in the consultation, which was first reported on RollonFriday.

In a statement, a spokesman for Pinsent Masons said: “The merger between Pinsent Masons and McGrigors created a firm with over 2,500 people across the UK, the Gulf and Asia Pacific. Since the merger, the firm has embarked on an exercise to review existing support structures and consider what changes would be needed to provide the highest level of support to the combined business.

“Unfortunately, as with any merger, there are a number of duplicate roles within our support teams and as such we’ve identified a small number of potential redundancies in those areas.

“It’s expected that around 40 people from both legacy firms across the UK will be affected. We’ll be entering a redundancy consultation process with those affected and anticipate that this will be complete by the end of July. No fee-earner role is at risk.”

To be fair, is anybody surprised? There had to be some financial incentive for the merger to be worthwhile after all – why would two law firms merge other than to share overheads, which sadly includes support staff, who surely must have seen the writing on the wall well in advance.

That aside, it remains that this merger was just a fundamentally bad idea. The eventual financial gain after the dust has finally settled will be minimal and 100% not worth the hassle / associated costs and disruption to the working environments.

There is clearly NO “strong” ETO message in the transcripted notes from the official message, they opted for the operational route of the TUPE regs, but this is clearly as grey as dusk, they may end up with some nasty some unfair dismissal cases if they do not act within these rules and of course reasonably to thier loyal staff, whos as stated above were the ones that made a smooth transition happen in the first place!